Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [world of reading .txt] 📗

My lady’s beaming smiles, my lady’s

winning words, my lady’s radiant glances and bewitching graces had done

their work of enchantment, and Sir Michael had grown to look upon his

daughter as a somewhat wilful and capricious young person who had

behaved with determined unkindness to the wife he loved.

 

Poor Alicia saw all this, and bore her burden as well as she could. It

seemed very hard to be a handsome, gray-eyed heiress, with dogs and

horses and servants at her command, and yet to be so much alone in the

world as to know of not one friendly ear into which she might pour her

sorrows.

 

“If Bob was good for anything I could have told him how unhappy I am,”

thought Miss Audley; “but I may just as well tell Caesar my troubles for

any consolation I should get from Cousin Robert.”

 

Sir Michael Audley obeyed his pretty nurse, and went to bed a little

after nine o’clock upon this bleak March evening. Perhaps the baronet’s

bedroom was about the pleasantest retreat that an invalid could have

chosen in such cold and cheerless weather. The dark-green velvet

curtains were drawn before the windows and about the ponderous bed. The

wood fire burned redly upon the broad hearth. The reading lamp was

lighted upon a delicious little table close to Sir Michael’s pillow, and

a heap of magazines and newspapers had been arranged by my lady’s own

fair hands for the pleasure of the invalid.

 

Lady Audley sat by the bedside for about ten minutes, talking to her

husband, talking very seriously, about this strange and awful

question—Robert Audley’s lunacy; but at the end of that time she rose

and bade her husband good-night.

 

She lowered the green silk shade before the reading lamp, adjusting it

carefully for the repose of the baronet’s eyes.

 

“I shall leave you, dear,” she said. “If you can sleep, so much the

better. If you wish to read, the books and papers are close to you. I

will leave the doors between the rooms open, and I shall hear your voice

if you call me.”

 

Lady Audley went through her dressing-room into the boudoir, where she

had sat with her husband since dinner.

 

Every evidence of womanly refinement was visible in the elegant chamber.

My lady’s piano was open, covered with scattered sheets of music and

exquisitely-bound collections of scenas and fantasias which no master

need have disdained to study. My lady’s easel stood near the window,

bearing witness to my lady’s artistic talent, in the shape of a

water-colored sketch of the Court and gardens. My lady’s fairy-like

embroideries of lace and muslin, rainbow-hued silks, and

delicately-tinted wools littered the luxurious apartment; while the

looking-glasses, cunningly placed at angles and opposite corners by an

artistic upholsterer, multiplied my lady’s image, and in that image

reflected the most beautiful object in the enchanted chamber.

 

Amid all this lamplight, gilding, color, wealth, and beauty, Lucy Audley

sat down on a low seat by the fire to think.

 

If Mr. Holman Hunt could have peeped into the pretty boudoir, I think

the picture would have been photographed upon his brain to be reproduced

by-and-by upon a bishop’s half-length for the glorification of the

pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. My lady in that half-recumbent attitude,

with her elbow resting on one knee, and her perfect chin supported by

her hand, the rich folds of drapery falling away in long undulating

lines from the exquisite outline of her figure, and the luminous,

rose-colored firelight enveloping her in a soft haze, only broken by the

golden glitter of her yellow hair—beautiful in herself, but made

bewilderingly beautiful by the gorgeous surroundings which adorn the

shrine of her loveliness. Drinking-cups of gold and ivory, chiseled by

Benvenuto Cellini; cabinets of buhl and porcelain, bearing the cipher of

Austrain Marie-Antoinette, amid devices of rosebuds and true-lovers’

knots, birds and butterflies, cupidons and shepherdesses, goddesses,

courtiers, cottagers, and milkmaids; statuettes of Parian marble and

biscuit china; gilded baskets of hothouse flowers; fantastical caskets

of Indian filigree-work; fragile teacups of turquoise china, adorned by

medallion miniatures of Louis the Great and Louis the Well-beloved,

Louise de la Valliere, Athenais de Montespan, and Marie Jeanne Gomard de

Vaubernier: cabinet pictures and gilded mirrors, shimmering satin and

diaphanous lace; all that gold can buy or art devise had been gathered

together for the beautification of this quiet chamber in which my lady

sat listening to the mourning of the shrill March wind, and the flapping

of the ivy leaves against the casements, and looking into the red chasms

in the burning coals.

 

I should be preaching a very stale sermon, and harping upon a very

familiar moral, if I were to seize this opportunity of declaiming

against art and beauty, because my lady was more wretched in this

elegant apartment than many a half-starved seamstress in her dreary

garret. She was wretched by reason of a wound which lay too deep for the

possibility of any solace from such plasters as wealth and luxury; but

her wretchedness was of an abnormal nature, and I can see no occasion

for seizing upon the fact of her misery as an argument in favor of

poverty and discomfort as opposed to opulence. The Benvenuto Cellini

carvings and the Sevres porcelain could not give her happiness, because

she had passed out of their region. She was no longer innocent; and the

pleasure we take in art and loveliness being an innocent pleasure, had

passed beyond her reach. Six or seven years before, she would have been

happy in the possession of this little Aladdin’s palace; but she had

wandered out of the circle of careless, pleasure seeking creatures, she

had strayed far away into a desolate labyrinth of guilt and treachery,

terror and crime, and all the treasures that had been collected for her

could have given her no pleasure but one, the pleasure of flinging them

into a heap beneath her feet and trampling upon them and destroying them

in her cruel despair.

 

There were some things that would have inspired her with an awful joy, a

horrible rejoicing. If Robert Audley, her pitiless enemy, her

unrelenting pursuer, had lain dead in the adjoining chamber, she would

have exulted over his bier.

 

What pleasures could have remained for Lucretia Borgia and Catharine de

Medici, when the dreadful boundary line between innocence and guilt was

passed, and the lost creatures stood upon the lonely outer side? Only

horrible, vengeful joys, and treacherous delights were left for these

miserable women. With what disdainful bitterness they must have watched

the frivolous vanities, the petty deceptions, the paltry sins of

ordinary offenders. Perhaps they took a horrible pride in the enormity

of their wickedness; in this “Divinity of Hell,” which made them

greatest among sinful creatures.

 

My lady, brooding by the fire in her lonely chamber, with her large,

clear blue eyes fixed upon the yawning gulfs of lurid crimson in the

burning coals, may have thought of many things very far away from the

terribly silent struggle in which she was engaged. She may have thought

of long-ago years of childish innocence, childish follies and

selfishness, of frivolous, feminine sins that had weighed very lightly

upon her conscience. Perhaps in that retrospective revery she recalled

that early time in which she had first looked in the glass and

discovered that she was beautiful; that fatal early time in which she

had first begun to look upon her loveliness as a right divine, a

boundless possession which was to be a set-off against all girlish

shortcomings, a counterbalance of every youthful sin. Did she remember

the day in which that fairy dower of beauty had first taught her to be

selfish and cruel, indifferent to the joys and sorrows of others,

cold-hearted and capricious, greedy of admiration, exacting and

tyrannical with that petty woman’s tyranny which is the worst of

despotism? Did she trace every sin of her life back to its true source?

and did she discover that poisoned fountain in her own exaggerated

estimate of the value of a pretty face? Surely, if her thoughts wandered

so far along the backward current of her life, she must have repented in

bitterness and despair of that first day in which the master-passions of

her life had become her rulers, and the three demons of Vanity,

Selfishness, and Ambition, had joined hands and said, “This woman is our

slave, let us see what she will become under our guidance.”

 

How small those first youthful errors seemed as my lady looked back upon

them in that long revery by the lonely hearth! What small vanities, what

petty cruelties! A triumph over a schoolfellow; a flirtation with the

lover of a friend; an assertion of the right divine invested in blue

eyes and shimmering golden-tinted hair. But how terribly that narrow

pathway had widened out into the broad highroad of sin, and how swift

the footsteps had become upon the now familiar way!

 

My lady twisted her fingers in her loose amber curls, and made as if she

would have torn them from her head. But even in that moment of mute

despair the unyielding dominion of beauty asserted itself, and she

released the poor tangled glitter of ringlets, leaving them to make a

halo round her head in the dim firelight.

 

“I was not wicked when I was young,” she thought, as she stared

gloomingly at the fire, “I was only thoughtless. I never did any

harm—at least, wilfully. Have I ever been really wicked, I wonder?”

she mused. “My worst wickednesses have bean the result of wild impulses,

and not of deeply-laid plots. I am not like the women I have read of,

who have lain night after night in the horrible darkness and stillness,

planning out treacherous deeds, and arranging every circumstance of an

appointed crime. I wonder whether they suffered—those women—whether

they ever suffered as—”

 

Her thoughts wandered away into a weary maze of confusion. Suddenly she

drew herself up with a proud, defiant gesture, and her eyes glittered

with a light that was not entirely reflected from the fire.

 

“You are mad, Mr. Robert Audley,” she said, “you are mad, and your

fancies are a madman’s fancies. I know what madness is. I know its signs

and tokens, and I say that you are mad.”

 

She put her hand to her head, as if thinking of something which confused

and bewildered her, and which she found it difficult to contemplate with

calmness.

 

“Dare I defy him?” she muttered. “Dare I? dare I? Will he stop, now that

he has once gone so far? Will he stop for fear of me? Will he stop for

fear of me, when the thought of what his uncle must suffer has not

stopped him? Will anything stop him—but death?”

 

She pronounced the last words in an awful whisper; and with her head

bent forward, her eyes dilated, and her lips still parted as they had

been parted in her utterance of that final word “death,” she sat blankly

staring at the fire.

 

“I can’t plot horrible things,” she muttered, presently; “my brain isn’t

strong enough, or I’m not wicked enough, or brave enough. If I met

Robert Audley in those lonely gardens, as I—”

 

The current of her thoughts was interrupted by a cautious knocking at

her door. She rose suddenly, startled by any sound in the stillness of

her room. She rose, and threw herself into a low chair near the fire.

She flung her beautiful head back upon the soft cushions, and took a

book from the table near her. Insignificant as this action was, it spoke

very plainly. It spoke very plainly of ever-recurring fears—of fatal

necessities for concealment—of a mind that in its silent agonies was

ever alive to the importance of outward effect. It